Reading
Long-form writing, interviews, and discussions about attention, technology, and how to think clearly about both.
Every second you spend on a platform is a transaction. You just never agreed to the terms.
Every major technology platform you use is built on a single business model: sell your attention to advertisers. This is not a side effect — it is the design. Understanding this changes the question from “why can’t I put my phone down?” to “what would it take to make a genuinely free choice here?”
All articles
In a wide-ranging conversation, Newport argues that the productivity industry has systematically confused busyness with output, and that the real crisis isn't inefficiency — it's the collapse of time for deep, meaningful work.
I didn't plan to quit Instagram — I planned to take a break. Thirty days later, I had a clearer picture of what the app was actually providing me versus what I had believed it was providing me. The gap was larger than I expected.
In this episode, we explore the growing community of people redesigning their phone use from first principles — grayscale displays, dumb phone experiments, intentional notification architecture — and ask what a phone designed for the user (rather than the platform) would actually look like.
Before the feed, reading online meant navigating to something specific and reading it in full. Infinite scroll replaced that with a continuous stream of fragments, none of which you chose, none of which you finish. The damage to our reading habits is real — and largely reversible.
The features that make apps feel compelling are not accidents. They are the output of deliberate design methodologies — borrowed from behavioural psychology, casino design, and decades of A/B testing — that exploit the predictable architecture of the human reward system.
The costs of high-stimulation digital environments are not dramatic or sudden. They accumulate invisibly, in the form of shortened attention spans, impaired deep work capacity, chronic cognitive fatigue, and a growing inability to be present in one's own life.
The platforms marketed as tools for human connection have produced measurable declines in relationship quality, in-person social time, and psychological wellbeing — particularly among heavy users. The mechanisms are structural, not incidental.
The information environment created by engagement-optimised algorithms does not merely select what you see — it systematically amplifies content that produces strong emotional reactions, gradually distorting your picture of reality in ways that are difficult to detect from inside the system.
Behind the consumer experience of digital platforms lies a political economy: a set of ownership structures, incentive systems, and power relationships that determine who benefits from the attention economy and how that benefit is extracted.
Some of the most useful thinking about digital technology comes not from inside the industry but from adjacent fields: media theory, philosophy, sociology, and cognitive science. These frameworks offer vocabulary and structure for problems that are otherwise difficult to think about clearly.